There’s lots of talk recently about the wealth of Jeff Bezos. There are maps comparing his wealth to entire countries, a “You are Jeff Bezos” game where you can spend his money on different things - like paying their fair-share of taxes, and a graphic that puts his wealth in perspective. A recurring point is that most people simply cannot fathom the amount of money he has. The number is $150 billion. My favorite attempt to bring the number into human terms is Quartz’s article, “The average US worker would need 10 times the length of all human history to earn as much as Jeff Bezos”. This beautifully captures the point that someone does not simply earn or work for such an amount of money, but rather captures it. We, at degrowth.info, thought a similar calculation would be interesting. We wanted to know how many humble (but hopefully useful) projects like ours Jeff Bezos’ wealth could pay for. In case you haven’t heard already, degrowth.info is improving its site to better support the degrowth community and improve the usability of the platform – this will cost 7,500€.
Degrowth is a movement that explores another direction for society, one where ecological and social justice become possible, along with more meaningful lives. While there is no single definition for degrowth, this entry attempts to offer some guidance for understanding degrowth in all its diversity. First, degrowth is a variety of challenges to the current status quo. Secondly, degrowth ...
The degrowth-conference took place in Leipzig in September 2014. Fortunately, the collected voluntary participation fee was higher than expected. This enables the conference team to allocate 9.000 Euro for project funding. Be it the promotion of discussions, the generation of knowledge, the education of people or a practical activity: The money should go to support small projects and courage...
On 14 March the last submission period closed for contributions to the conference. After a first quick review it was already clear that all expectations were far exceeded: more than 350 scientific papers were received from a broad range of disciplines such as economics, psychology, geography and urban planning. Further 260 proposals for practice-based activities were submitted by various civil-...